1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to providing graphic medical healthcare plans or protocols, and in particular a graphic user interface, for managing changes of such protocols.
2. The Background
Typically, developing a healthcare plan for providing medical services to patients has been a manual exercise. This process is fraught with inefficiencies related to sharing of information, data accuracy, and capturing complexity. Computerization of healthcare plans alleviates these problems and permits a new set of behaviors that would be prohibitive (or even impossible) in a manual system. However, most computerized implementations of manual processes tend to be static in nature. Even if they include branching logic for alternate process paths, the logic is codified a priori, in that changes to the process require wholesale application. That is, all patients in a system must use a given plan as it was originally designed. New versions of the plan are immediately applied to all patients in a system (past, present, or future).
However, treatment plans often change over time. Doctors may discover newer ways to treat certain ailments or they may simply decide that certain diagnosis or treatment decisions should be altered to be made more effective. This may result in multiple xe2x80x9cversionsxe2x80x9d of the same treatment plan. If a treatment plan is currently in use by a particular patient, major changes to the treatment plan could create chaos. For example, strep throat is generally treated with an antibiotic. If a patient was assigned this treatment and was currently on day 3 of a 12 day course of antibiotics, nothing should prevent that patient from continuing the antibiotic treatment. Even if a radically new anti-strep drug was invented, the patient should not stop the current course of antibiotics. Thus, while new patients developing strep throat should receive the new drug (as part of the new treatment plan for strep throat), existing patients should continue with the old treatment plan.
There are minor changes to treatment plans, however, that should be applied to patient currently receiving treatment under the plan, for example if new test results come in, or if old test results are deemed to be incorrect or unreliable. Thus it is desirable that an apparatus and method for providing a medical healthcare plan will also include the ability to differentiate between major and minor changes to treatment plans and to either apply a new plan or not apply a new plan to an existing patient based on the differentiation between the two types of changes.
Furthermore, when such an ability exists, the result may be multiple instances of the same treatment plan being available at any one period of time. As time goes by, physicians may choose to eliminate certain instances of the treatment plan, merge them with the most recent plan, or even create new plans combining the best aspects of prior treatment plans. It is therefore desirable that an apparatus and method for providing a medical healthcare plan will also include the ability to manage multiple versions of the treatment plans.
A method and apparatus for managing changes to computerized medical protocols is provided. Each change to a medical protocol results in a new binary file being generated. Each binary file associated with the protocol then has a version number, which may be divided into two parts: a major version number and a minor version number. The default is that major changes to the medical protocol result in an incremented major number while minor changes to the medical protocol result in an incremented minor number. At assignment time, the version of the medical protocol to be assigned is assumed to be the one with the highest major number. At execution time, the version of the medical protocol to be executed is assumed to be the one with the highest minor number. This allows for the constant modification of treatment protocols without interfering with the protocols of patients already receiving treatment.